Observations on economics, the academy, the wider world, and things that run on rails.

11.1.12

POLITICAL COMMENTARY DISGUISED AS AN ACTION THRILLER.

The first entry in this year's Fifty Book Challenge will be Tom Clancy's Locked On. I read it rather quickly, and it has a lot of the usual characters going after the usual suspects, with some of the usual antagonists. Maybe I should call it a work "in the school of Tom Clancy," as one Mark Greaney is stealthily listed as a coauthor. Maybe I'm getting jaded with the genre, or maybe the electoral tussle between Jack Ryan, seeking to be the first President since Grover Cleveland to serve non-concurrent terms, and a thinly disguised Edward Kennedy with the policy preferences of Barack Hussein Obama, right down to the Alinskyite allies who are more transparent in the book than in real life, is beginning to crowd out the plot and character development.